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White Lies’ Jack Lawrence-Brown Still Loves: Talk Talk

British trio White Lies—guitarist/vocalist Harry McVeigh, bassist Charles Cave and drummer Jack Lawrence-Brown—just released Ritual (Geffen/Fiction), which follows up To Lose My Life…, the band’s commercially successful 2009 debut. The 10-track sophomore LP was co-produced by Alan Moulder (Depeche Mode, Killers) and was written over a five-week period when White Lies wasn’t crisscrossing the globe in support of its first album. Though McVeigh, Cave and Lawrence-Brown are all barely old enough to drink legally in the U.S., the threesome has been playing together as a band since their mid-teens, first as Fear Of Flying, which released two singles produced by Stephen Street (Smiths, Blur), and then under the White Lies moniker. The trio will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with them.

Lawrence-Brown: Talk Talk are a band that had an incredible career. They were active between 1981 and 1991, and their level of vision and progression between these two dates is really extraordinary. Their early work was fairly straightforward glam-influenced rock music, but as the ’80s progressed, their sound became more and more experimental and ambitious. The last two albums of the band’s career, Spirit Of Eden (1988) and Laughing Stock (1991), are vast and minimal and a world away from their earlier records. These albums are comprised of hours and hours of improvised performance, painstakingly rearranged after recording into the song structures that sit on the final record. They didn’t let their record label hear any of the sessions as they progressed and made albums free of any compromise whatsoever. The idea that they’re best known for No Doubt’s (pretty darn good) cover of “It’s My Life” is a bit of a downer, because it is the end of Talk Talk’s career that is the most exciting and interesting by far.